What is a haunted house? At its most basic level, it’s a house that just… feels wrong. Moving is stressful, and a new home brings those anxieties to the fore. Haunted house movies just literalize all those fears. Something awful happened, once. Now, the memory of that moment is alive — well, not alive alive — and undeniable. But even without a literal ghost, those feelings happen. They didn’t come out of nowhere. And The Nest, Sean Durkin’s just-released IFC film, is about that feeling, that moment. The moment when the pent up stresses of a family in crisis boil, and then blow.
There are no ghosts in The Nest. No monsters leap from the closet. No one dies. At heart, it is a domestic drama. And yet, like 2020’s excellent biopic Shirley, it mines its relationships for a tension most horror films wish they could match.
“I think we need to move. There’s an opportunity.”
Allison (Carrie Coon) and Rory (Jude Law) seem to have it all. They have a lovely house, a stable paycheck, and two beautiful children (Charlie Shotwell and Oona Roche). But Rory needs more. He was a stockbroker in London, once upon a time, and he has a chance now to go back to it working for his old boss. He has a chance to make real money. It’s the 1980s. Deregulation is coming, privatization will sweep the world like a wave, and there’s money to be made in the looting.
So he packs his family up and moves them to the UK. He rents a mansion in Surrey — it’s rundown, and they have nowhere near the money to afford it long term nor the furniture to fill it now — enrolls his son in the best private school, and gets to work. He has big plans and even bigger dreams. What he doesn’t have is money. And Allison knows it.
There are cracks in the facade that are visible pretty much immediately. The way she hides cash from him, makes sure she always has a little nest egg of her own. The way they move around. How easily Rory slips into the lies of a man pretending to be richer than he is. And how uncomfortable Allison is trying to live those lies.
“Things are dried up here, for me.”
In the hands of a more cliched filmmaker, this is a story we’ve seen a hundred times before. Rory got sucked in by the American dream — fast money, on demand. He’s every hard-working 80s dad who ignored his family because he was too obsessed with material wealth. But Durkin provides the character with so much depth. He acknowledges that there’s a cost to this mindset, but also an origin for it. Jude Law has so much material here to sink his teeth into, and he is phenomenal. His weathered face and receding hairline clean up well, but at times he has the energy of a used car salesman.
In a way, he’s playing the opposite role from his time in The Talented Mr. Ripley. There, young and handsome, Law was the emblem of urbane extravagance falling prey to an American parasite. Law was a beautiful gadabout, a rich kid without a care. In The Nest, it is Law who is the parasite. He brings to London a more American hunger, the same hunger that drove Ripley. He has to hustle, has to fake it. And he just isn’t that good at it. Law gives the character just a touch too much desperation. It’s beautiful.
Carrie Coon is just as central. Coon came to fame with her staggering turn in The Leftovers, and I was worried that she would be trapped as a long-suffering wife. Instead, Allison has her own trauma, her own needs. She isn’t afraid of hard work, she’s familiar with it, likes it even — but she grew up poor in a conservative family. She wants more. But, at least a little, she also wants to do what she was raised to do. She wants to follow him. So she does.
If Rory buys whole-heartedly into the era’s mythos, Allison tears herself apart trying to live its contradictions. She seems most comfortable working with horses and in stables, where she has a naturalism that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Kelly Reichardt film. But that isn’t enough, that’s not respectable, and it’s not secure. She she wear’s backless dresses and fur coats to fancy parties, where she hates every minute. The half-hidden smirk she plays these scenes with is brilliant acting; Allison both understands how important these events are and cannot pretend she doesn’t also see how fake everyone is.
“You a good dad?”
Both Allison and Rory are strong characters, but part of what makes The Nest excel is the whole family. Sam (Roche) is Coon’s daughter from a previous relationship; Benjamin (Shotwell) is the son Rory and Allison had together. The film is never too blunt in its treatment of the complex family dynamics, even as it brings them to life with horrifying clarity. Shotwell in particular is one of the finest child actors I’ve seen. His anxiety and nervousness, quietly simmering for much of the movie, flawlessly portray a child too young to totally comprehend the fights happening around him but eager not to add to them. The film’s most heartbreaking scenes are often his.
I don’t want to undersell Oona Roche either. Roche and Coon have an outstanding mother-daughter relationship. It’s complex and nuanced in a way teen characters’ relationships with parents so rarely are. Roche has a way of casually lashing out at Coon that I’ve seen before in teen characters, but the way she backs up immediately when her mother has reason to grieve felt new and earnest. Similarly, I thought the movie did a great job at using Roche to show how generational trauma can slide quietly from one person to another, letting the two have their most similar moment before forcing Roche to display a maturity she hadn’t before.
At the start of the film, the four have a shockingly naturalistic chemistry. Rory seems like a good father. The kids are content. The family dynamics are strong and interesting. And yet, the scars, we learn, were always present. We open on what might be a high point for the family, but the movie doesn’t pretend that they’re the Brady’s.
“What line of work you in?”
With his 2011 debut film, Martha Marcy May Marlene, writer/director Sean Durkin established a profound talent for the horror in human misery. The Nest may have taken a long time to arrive, but it was worth the wait. Both films are about the uncertainty of life after trauma, the way people cope with a hard past by building an unstable future. Few filmmakers understand that kind of anxiety better. Likewise, few get the way that anxiety can translate into trauma, into hurting the ones you love.
The Nest is about a moment in time when the priorities of society shifted wildly. The contradictions of that shift — make more money no matter the cost, but also we need to celebrate the ‘traditional family‘ — are still being felt to this day. But what Durkin wants to interrogate about that moment is its psychological cost. To that end, he gave two of our finest actors deeply lived-in roles, and in doing so, crafted one of the year’s best dramas.
Perhaps that’s why the film so often feels like a horror movie. In horror, the outsized emotions of the leads are personified by monsters and murderers. In The Nest, the symbols are more mundane — a horse; a fur coat — but the emotional weight behind them is no less powerful. You could call it Martha Marcy May Marlene by way of The Talented Mr. Ripley, but the genre signifiers have all been stripped out. What’s left is a tense, powerful domestic drama about a family in crisis. And it’s riveting.
The Nest is out now in theaters. Written and directed by Sean Durkin, The Nest stars Jude Law and Carrie Coon.